I dream about old houses, places where no one has lived for years. In my dreams, I visit the places alone, or with shadowy night creatures I know are part of me even as I dream. The houses speak to me of the lives they have witnessed, but that is not what enthralls me. They were the canvas of time and space that held and framed and kept the life that went on inside of them with the knowledge of a pregnant being.

Last night, I walked through the rooms of a great old Victorian, observing the layout, planning its restoration. I long to dress and furnish these rooms. I caress the banisters as I walk up the stairs. I try to remember every detail, but what is left to me in waking is not detail, but the feeling of a presence.

How can I take you there?

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Words whisper, carrying more than one might know, hypostases, rather than mere understanding. Words grow from roots, spawn families, travel and mingle, get lost, get found, and often marry the strangest bedfellows. Like our bodies, our ideas, and our culture, words evolve, handed down to us from a place beyond memory. As the warp and woof of language, words possess the magic to shape the immaterial into the solid things of psyche ~From my intro to AO's The Archives of the Heart

"Although we still mistake the space of the mind ... for the space outside, we are learning the former is no less powerful than the latter. Identity, power, and historical truth have their roots in these imaginative realms. Every individual thinks part of a tradition and therefore is thought by it..."~Ioan Culiano

Beatrice

"...We want healing from illness, but it's through illness that we grow and are healed of our complacency. We're afraid of loss, and yet it's through what we lose that we're able to find what nothing can take away from us. We run from sadness and depression. But if we really face our sadness we find it speaks with the voice of our deepest longing; and if we face it a little longer we find that it teaches us the way to attain what we long for. ..." ~Peter Kingsley in The DARK PLACES of WISDOM

IMAGINE BETTER

Εἲς Ἀσκληπιόν

“People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further." ~ Pema Chodron

Mnemosyne

What is of particular importance for the study of literature, however, is that the manifestations of the collective unconscious are compensatory to the conscious attitude, so they have the effect of bringing a one-sided, unadapted, or dangerous state of consciousness back into equilibrium.~CGJung, Psychology and Literature in Modern Man in Search of a Soul

The inspired speech of mythbegotten of the Daimonreveals that the world is the theaterof the periodic revolution of soul.link